Who said it?

The answer is here, but before you click through first try to guess who is being interviewed in this exchange:

Interviewee: … Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers – bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn’t make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn’t change.

I’m Scott’s age (exactly) and I agree. The passage reads a lot like the Memoirs v 1 book, or whatever it’s called. I found that book to be a real revelation — I was never a big fan, but the book fleshed out a context for Dylan’s career that was interesting and evocative.

I assume that anyone in my age group, the sub 30 age group, with an average level of Dylan awareness would be thrown off by the side show references. I think that probably extends to people under 40ish in general. Maybe I’m underestimating what an average level of Dylan awareness is these days though.

Like Scott and bdbd, it seemed obvious to me. Of course, I bought my first Dylan album in 1963 (The Times They Are a-Changin’, with the “11 Outlined Epitaphs” beginning on the back)…and every album since (including Shot of Love, I’m sorry to say).